


two envelopes

by villanellogy



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Other, Second person POV, cw for tracheostomy stuff if that grosses you out, established villaneve, eve sends divorce papers and niko reflects on how fucking nuts his life is, ok before we get to the tags: I KNOW HOW IT SOUNDS PLEASE TRUST ME AND GIVE IT A CHANCE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25680835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanellogy/pseuds/villanellogy
Summary: Niko reflects.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 9
Kudos: 100





	two envelopes

**Author's Note:**

> I know we all love to bag on Niko (rightfully) because he's as exciting as watching paint dry. And do NOT get me wrong, I prayed for the day Eve would stop giving a shit about him. But, like...c'mon, y'all, how would _you_ feel if your wife turned out to be nuts and then fell in love with another woman who's also nuts? And I couldn't get this out of my head, so, here you go.

You are forty-five and you are living in your father’s house. You are re-learning to swallow food like you are a baby in a nursery. You are in pain about eighty, eight-five percent of the time.

And two envelopes show up on the doorstep.

Somehow, you know what the manila envelope contains even before you open it. You would know her loopy, curling handwriting with your eyes closed in the dark. A friendly sans serif font stamped onto thin computer paper informs you that your wife has filled out an application for divorce.

Even as you hate yourself for it, you comb through the papers, searching for an address, a phone number, an email address, but she’s filled out a separate form to keep them from you. She’s cited “behaviour” as the reason, and you suppose it’s a small mercy she didn’t take the opportunity to accuse you of adultery one last time while committing it herself. The house has already been sold, and there’s no other real property to divide. God knows neither of you really wanted children. As divorces go, it is shockingly neat. She is assuming all costs for the proceedings, according to the form, and you wonder where she’s getting the money, since last you heard she had quit the kitchen prep job for another wild goose chase.

Your father comes into the kitchen, where you have the papers spread out in a burst across the dark wood of the table. Despite the fact that you live with him now like a deadbeat out of university, you don’t talk much. He has questions, as anyone would. What has happened is too great, too overwhelmingly terrible to be the result of a marital squabble and shit luck with pitchforks. The story is full of holes, and though he is a taciturn man, he is not a stupid one.

But how could you possibly tell him the truth? How could you type it out? _She was hired by a secret government agency to catch an assassin, which she assured me was not dangerous even after two of her coworkers were murdered. I watched her bloom before my eyes into something I’d only ever seen hints of before, someone mean, someone callous, with an appetite for danger. She stabbed the assassin, and then hired her to work with her, and though I don’t have confirmation I’m fairly certain she slept with her somewhere along the way._

The weight of it is something you must bear alone. You will resent her forever, for that. You used to value honesty, and now you evade the simplest of queries about where your life started to go wrong. No one else should have to know. Honestly, no one would believe you if you told them.

It is four in the afternoon, the usual time your father fixes his third cup of chicory coffee of the day. The scent permeates your childhood memories. On autopilot, he moves to the canister on the worktop, goes to put the kettle on, and then pauses.

“What’s that?”

You indicate, sapped of the energy to type out anything on your speech device, which is never more than six inches from your right hand. He abandons the cylinder of coffee grounds and examines the forms.

“About time, the bitch,” he grunts. You remember the days when you would virulently defend her to your family, sometimes in hushed voices in the kitchen during holiday dinners, sometimes yelling over the phone while she was at work, or yoga. Now, you sit in silence. “Did she send a letter, too?”

He holds up the other envelope, which you had momentarily forgotten about in your consumption with the divorce papers. You take it from your father’s hand, and he goes back to preparing his coffee as you slip a thumb under the flap and tear it open.

A single sheet of notebook paper slides out, neatly folded.

_Niko—_

_I think almost every day about what you said on that patio at the facility, that you deserve better than me. At the time, it made me so angry I could barely speak, trying to hang on to something that I had already broken. Yes, this is me taking “accountability”—you always used to use that word with me, trying to get me to “communicate.”_

_But I will be honest with you. You deserve that, too. I don’t regret most of my choices, but I do regret that you were the collateral damage that resulted from them. Not just what happened in Poland, but all of it. You are a good man. I’m not a good woman, though you thought I was for a long time, and I tried to be one for you. It is as simple as that._

_So. This will be the last you hear from me. All you have to do is sign the paper and send it back. You’ll get a couple of confirmations, and then you’ll be free of me, which I’m sure will be a relief. I hope you can be happy again._

_Eve_

You put the letter down, then pick it back up again. And, although you instinctively know what you will find, you bring the piece of paper to your nose, block off your tube with an index finger, and inhale.

It’s faint, but it’s there. The scent that started to pervade your life as she started to pervade Eve’s. You first smelled it lingering on Eve’s pillow, bergamot and violet mixing with the usual laundry detergent. Then the scent was stronger, hanging in the bathroom after a shower, a ghost of it in the kitchen.

You found the bottle, stashed like a teenager’s fifths of vodka, in the back of her shelf on the wardrobe, tucked up in a couple of winter sweaters she never wore. _La Villanelle_ , languorous on a bed of black silk, like a lover. You made a comment that night, hope and the beginnings of resentment sticking in your throat, that she smelled nice, and did she get a new perfume? To which she demurred, said that it was probably a different shampoo that she was trying out.

She hadn’t even had the decency to come up with a good fucking lie. You’d watched her line up the same hair products in the bathrooms you’ve shared for over a _decade._ Eve must have known that you wouldn’t believe it, but by that point she was so far gone you were barely surprised. She’d already burned up the best parts of herself, leaving someone whose laugh sounded like a flame’s crackle, who slapped you across the face and then flew off to God-knows-where, who lay down across from a woman and slipped a knife between her ribs.

The letter smells of _La Villanelle._ It’s haunting, intoxicating, ineffable, and it turns your stomach.

You toss the sheet of paper away from you, as though it’s turned white-hot between your fingers which feel suddenly nerveless. You sit back in the chair and breathe, breathe, breathe; you feel so sick you might vomit, which is a painful and potentially life-threatening process in the wake of the trach tube.

To your father’s credit, he does not ask. He fixes you a cup of coffee, hot and strong and bitter. You sit across from him, feeling it crawl down your healing throat to warm your stomach, trying to banish the perfume’s lingering notes with the tobacco-smoke-scented brew.

x

On a Thursday in November five months after you divorce Eve, on the slate-grey and chilly high street of Warsaw, you see her. You see _them._

You are on one of your long walks through town, trying to get away from your father’s reproachful eyes. He won’t say anything that he’s thinking, but you know, and it weighs heavy on your shoulders. So you have a a corduroy coat buttoned up to your neck, and a pair of warm driving gloves, and a scarf loosely covering the tracheostomy tube, and you are pacing down the sidewalks looking absently into windows and through the newly bare branches of the trees.

You see her hair first, at a distance. More precisely, you see her hair and think, _God, that’s a spitting image,_ because though the universe clearly has had it out for you, you cannot imagine a coincidence this severe. A few steps closer, and it becomes obvious that it is her, and the universe is cruel, and you hurl yourself through the door of the nearest storefront to watch from behind a garish window display.

She looks good, which makes you angry. If there were any divine justice, she would be in as much or more pain than you are. She is wearing a long plum woolen coat, dark jeans and expensive-looking boots with a short heel. Her cheeks are flushed from the chill, but her pallor is healthy.

She’s smiling, laughing, and she is on the arm of a tall, cruelly beautiful blonde woman in fluffy earmuffs. The last time you saw this woman, she was launching a snow globe at your head for the crime of loving your wife. The hand that wielded the projectile, that held you at knifepoint, that tied off the plastic to contain Gemma’s last breaths, is now resting comfortably on Eve’s waist as they walk down the sidewalk together, their steps synchronized. There are four shopping bags in her other hand, each done up with tissue paper like a fussy cake.

You are not a violent man. As a child, your mother called you sensitive. You got into a couple of bar fights at uni, because everyone gets into a couple of bar fights at uni, but you have always been the peacemaker. Now, though, the most graphic, visceral images flash through your mind. You wish that you could go back in time, back and back to that lane in Oxford. You would slam her harder against that wall, watch her brains splatter across the brick and down her oatmeal-colored sweater. You think about how it would feel to stab her like Eve did, to see her blood run in bright rivulets. You’ve never shot a gun, but you picture putting a bullet through her heart, or perhaps her throat, to be poetic about it. Rage swirls under your skin, making your hands itch as you watch them walk away together.

You could do it, you think. You don’t have a weapon, but you could certainly make do with a chunk of asphalt from a badly paved side street, or maybe even your bare hands. You actually take a few steps toward the door of the shop you have been hiding in.

And then you pause. You breathe, feeling the air move through your tube.

Because this is what she does, isn’t it? This is what she did to Eve. Consumed her, and turned her from the laughing woman who smashed cake into your face at your wedding reception into someone who could commit unspeakable violence.

This will not, this cannot be what she does to you, too.

So you wait until they turn a corner, and it is like they were never there. You turn from the window, and there is a saleswoman with long braids standing nearby looking mildly concerned. When she asks you if everything is alright, it takes you a moment to fumble your phone out of your pocket and type into your dictation app, _Sorry, I just saw someone I didn’t want to run into._

To which she grins, the concern dissipating from her eyes. “We’ve all been there.” And her gaze looks you up and down, like she’s checking you out, or wondering what happened to you. Those looks are indistinguishable, these days. “Well, take your time, and if you need help finding anything, I’ll be around. My name’s Lucyna.”

 _Thanks, Lucyna,_ you type. _But I had better get going._

Back on the sidewalk, you cap your tube with a finger, and inhale until your throat and lungs are burning, until you are practically shaking with the effort. You smell nothing but exhaust, and sausages cooking on a nearby cart, and the crisp freshness of late-autumn chill.

**Author's Note:**

> i. me to my girlfriend: "i never thought i would say the phrase 'self-indulgent one-shot from niko's point of view' but here we are huh" 
> 
> ii. you can thank google for the tried-my-best-but-likely-slightly-inaccurate depiction of what happens after your whole shit gets fucked up by a pitchfork 
> 
> iii. villanellogy on tumblr if you feel like dragging me for writing a fic from niko's point of view. i probably deserve it tbh


End file.
